Many are questioning Booker’s math, however. Oliver Thomas, who wrote the USA Today piece, notes that “in Finland, the child poverty rate is about 5%. In the U.S., the rate is almost five times as high.” That would make the U.S. child poverty rate…

Where, then, did the senator get the idea that half of all students are in poverty? Likely from this subhead later in the piece.

The study cited describes not students in poverty but rather “low income” students, defined as those eligible for free or reduced lunches, and concludes that more than half of students in 17 states qualified as low income. So, what does it take to qualify for a reduced price lunch? The family must have a household income of less than 185 percent of the poverty line.